Canadian HR Reporter Weekly

2 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2018 CANADIAN HR REPORTER WEEKLY e time is ripe to implement a national daycare system in Canada, according to Bank of Canada governor Ste- phen Poloz, citing Quebec as a positive reason for such a change. Parents there pay $7.75 to $21.20 per day for child care. "e provincial government identified barriers keeping women out of the workforce and acted to reduce them, particularly by lowering the cost of child care and extending parental leave provisions. Within a few years, proportionately more prime-age Quebec women had jobs than women in the rest of Canada," said Poloz in a March 13 speech at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. In 1997, when Quebec first implemented its daycare plan, the labour force participation rate for women was 74 per cent. Today, it is 87 per cent, he said. "If we could simply bring the participation rate of prime-age women in the rest of Canada up to the level in Quebec, we could add almost 300,000 people to our country's workforce." But is the country ready for a full-fledged national system? e research is pretty clear that when there is available, high-quality child care and it's affordable for working parents, three major things happen, said Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa. "One, women are more likely to be attached to the paid labour force, more full-time and more securely attached; and second, the family stress is lower, the financial stress is lower, so families are able to manage their multiple responsibilities at home and work more effectively; and third, it's good for kids." e investment in daycare could also bring economic benefits to Canada, according to Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in Ottawa. "e Quebec system has proven, time and time again, studies have concluded it's a huge benefit not only for women but also for the families, also the economy in terms of spending: Every dollar that government puts into a child-care program, they get back sometimes two- and-a-half times, three times more at the end of the day," he said. "It allows women to fully participate in the economy, which has been identified as a major barrier and, of course, more importantly, it's also about getting the kids into early learning at an early age (instead of ) having to rely simply on this patchwork that we have across the country (with) everybody trying to make ends meet and trying to figure out whether or not they can take care of their kids properly." 'Optimistic analysis' But the governor's comments stem from a "very optimistic analysis" of the benefits, said Charles Lammam, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. "It is relying on a study that is really inflating the benefits of the program and understating the costs." "You must account for those other policy changes in order to have an accurate sense of what subsidized daycare will do to the labour market," he said, pointing to an analysis done by Pierre Fortin, emeritus professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, as the basis for Poloz's viewpoint. "We really need to have a better sense of what the problem is, and it's not really clear that there is this massive widespread issue across the country. And to the extent that we can draw from Quebec, we need to understand what other policy change happened during Does Canada really need a national child-care program? Proponents cite Quebec's success, but critics question methodology BY JOHN DUJAY Sign up for the Canadian HR Newswire today for free and enjoy great content from the publishers of Canadian HR Reporter. HR News at Your Fingertips THE LATEST NEWS THE BEST COMMENTARY DELIVERED WEEKLY FOR READING ON ANY DEVICE Visit www.hrreporter.com/ canadian-hr-newswire

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